Freud and Philosophy
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Paul Ricœur |
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| Original title | De l'interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud |
| Translator | Denis Savage |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis |
| Published |
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| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 573 (Yale edition) |
| ISBN | |
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (French: De l'interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud) is a 1965 book about Sigmund Freud by the philosopher Paul Ricœur. Sometimes grouped with works such as Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Freud and Philosophy has received praise, but critics have argued Ricœur provides a mistaken interpretation of Freud.
Ricœur argues that psychoanalysis is not a science but a language, a "semantics of desire." He seeks to bring Freud's ideas into conformity with the linguistic turn - the "effort to understand virtually all aspects of human behavior in terms of language."
For Ricœur, all interpretation partakes of a double hermeneutic. Psychoanalysis involves an "archaeology" of meanings, motives and desires, an attempt to delve into the unconscious layers of repressed or sublimated memory. Yet it also points a way through and beyond that condition by offering the patient renewed possibilities of self-knowledge and creative fulfillment.
The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, writing in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), criticized Ricœur's hermeneutic interpretation of Freud. Grünbaum denounces Ricœur's attempt to limit the proper subject of psychoanalysis to the verbal communications of the patient in analysis as "ideological surgery" and "mutilation" of psychoanalysis. Grünbaum argued that Freud could not have accepted such a limited conception of the proper domain of psychoanalysis, since he often considered the nonverbal behavior of patients, speculated about the psychological meaning of artifacts such as statues and paintings, and most importantly believed that his discoveries held true for people who had never been analyzed and therefore never had to produce a narrative account of their symptoms.
The philosopher Jeffrey Abramson compared Freud and Philosophy to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), arguing that they jointly placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry.
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